The appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services may be the most reckless of all of Donald Trump’s appointments.

During COVID, however, these individual acts of opting out morphed into an unlikely new political force – the “conspirituality” movement. The combination of personal health obsession with conspiracy upended traditional politics.

It gave right-wing extremism a major makeover.

Conspirituality didn’t just happen. It was driven by online algorithms that tapped obsessions over personal health and suspicion of science into wormhole paths for QAnon. This process is chillingly revealed in the book The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World by Max Fisher.